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Leon Miller is writing on civil religion from the state of Estonia, part of the Soviet Bloc for many decades. The Soviet bloc promoted an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, that officially rejected religion as "an opiate of the masses," but in fact it could qualify as a civil religion or at least a quasi-civil religion. Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed and the ideology has been discredited, there is a value vacuum in Eastern Europe.

Miller suggests that this vacuum can be replaced by a civil religion, an agreed upon set of values that form the basis for a social contract. Citing Rousseau, Durkheim, and a number of scholars, he suggests that cultural values can be formulated that will be accepted by nearly all citizens as an expression of the common good and serve as the basis of a civil religion, national identity, and cultural solidarity. This civil religion would be shaped as a consensus in the public forum "where legislators attempt to discern commonly agreed upon values."

While Miller recognizes there are often competing or opposite values, he believes that ultimately a reconciliation can be found. Throughout his article he mentions many different values and goods as he quotes various political theorists. He begins by stating Eastern European goals are to achieve "a deep respect for liberty, democracy and pluralism." Then he mentions the traditional values of Europe, which the Church played an important role in shaping. Already we may see a problem in reconciling just these two sets of values.

THE OPEN SOCIETY vs. A PLANNED SOCIETY

A problem which develops when one both tries to combine the concept of liberty and the protection of the basic right to pursue individual happiness with concepts of positive social goods like healthcare, housing, and public education is that there is mutual exclusivity. Karl Popper critiqued the Marxist attempt to do this in The Open Society and Its Enemies.

In other circles of discourse this has been called the conflict between negative rights and positive rights. Negative rights are those which people need in order to protect their physical lives and freely pursue a self-determined life on their own. Positive rights, like housing or health care, require the production and services of others (construction workers and doctors) that must be paid. Because payments for the goods provided by positive rights are based on government redistribution of funds and require some type of taxation by force, as well as mandates on producers, they limit the extent to which the members of society are free to pursue their own dreams. Positive rights arc determined by social elites and enforced by the government they control.

Tribal societies were extended families or groups with face-to-face relations in which survival of the group was the foremost common good. Positive rights are developed in these societies, but coercion is less necessary in the shaping of common goals because the needs of survival are more readily apparent to all members of the group, and personal selfishness is easily perceived in such close proximity and corruption is thwarted.

Agreeing on common positive goods in larger impersonal and bureaucratic societies is extremely difficult, and consensus on all but the most basic goals of life is nearly impossible. Large states and empires rend to collapse or suffer revolution when one person or an elite group imposes their notion of the common good on everyone else. More stable societies provide the goods associated with positive rights at the local community level of government where people cooperate on a face-to-face basis. (1)

IS THE NATION STATE...

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